Costello wants to make theater company a greater part of community

Josh Costello will take over as artistic director of Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre at the end of this season, the company announced Tuesday. He will succeed Tom Ross, who’s been with the company for its whole 27-year existence, 15 of them as artistic director.

Costello, 44, is currently literary manager and artistic associate at the Aurora, where he most recently directed “Eureka Day,” the winner of the Will Glickman Award for best new play to premiere locally in 2018. He’s directed acclaimed shows throughout the Bay Area, including San Francisco Playhouse’s “Ideation,” another Glickman winner; “Little Brother” at Custom Made Theatre Company, working from his own adaptation of Cory Doctorow’s novel; and “My Children, My Africa!” at Marin Theatre Company, where he served as artistic director of expanded programs (which included giving me my first Bay Area theater gig, as an assistant directing intern for “Magic Forest Farm”).

His career dates back to the 1996 founding of now-defunct Impact Theatre, which produced spunky, offbeat productions of new plays and classics geared toward audiences in their teens and 20s, all in the basement of a UC Berkeley pizza joint. Costello’s a Berkeley native and lives there still, with his wife, Sadie, a research scientist in epidemiology at Cal, and his children, Arden, 12, and Eliana, 8.

“There’s something tremendously ironic about the guy who started Impact now moving into this role at Aurora,” he says with a smile during an interview in Aurora’s conference room, where his speech frequently reaches ticker-tape pace, syllables driven home with soft, but emphatic, table drumming. Aurora’s audience is much older, and it produces a number of language-driven, drawing-room classics in period dress: works by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, the epistolary drama “Dear Master,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” which Costello will direct for the company in April.

“Part of what a theater should do is to claim these classic plays for our community and our generation,” he says. “Earnest,” for instance, he says, might be “set in London in 1895, but it’s so silly and so fun, and the wit and the charm and the subversive nature of the humor of that play don’t just belong to white folks.”

His vision for the Aurora “is to increase our focus on relevance and on plays that speak to the present moment. It’s not that we don’t do relevant plays now, but it’s something that we’re going to be talking about a lot more. When we talk about our plays, we want to talk about why we are choosing this play right now in this community.”

That relevance will come in part from a new focus on building community partnerships. “It’s not about, like, ‘Hey, we do this good thing; let me give it to you.’ It’s more about, ‘We’re in this community together. What are the issues we’re all dealing with? What stories can we tell together that address those issues?’ ”

Costello envisions putting the Aurora in its community’s service and sharing resources. “We have this space, and there’s more things that could happen in this space than are happening now. What do you need? What does your organization need? What do we have that we can offer you? What do you have that maybe we weren’t even thinking about?”

Cast member Lisa Anne Porter and director Josh Costello on the set of “Eureka Day.” Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2018

The Aurora has an annual budget of $2.1 million, and Costello will be heading a staff of 20, including 13 full-timers. It finished its most recent fiscal year in the black, says its managing director Julie Saltzman Kellner, and it has a remarkably loyal subscriber base, with 89 percent of subscribers returning each year, far beating the 74.6 percent national average reported by Theatre Communications Group for 2017.

Kellner says that from working with Costello for the past six years, she already knew he’s “a likeable, honorable person” with “this integrity to him.” What she appreciated anew when the Aurora interviewed Costello as part of a nationwide search was how “he articulated his vision so clearly for us. It was obvious to all of us what he meant, how we were going to get there, what the path would be.” Moreover, she says, “it was so sincere and so genuine and strong. His belief in the power of theater is moving. It inspired all of us.”

“With Josh,” says Board President Gary Moore, “we sense the energy, the vision and the passion that will take us to the next step.”

Playwright Jonathan Spector (left) and director Josh Costello during rehearsals on the set of “Eureka Day.” Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle 2018